Kuleshov's By the Law as a (Possible) Source for Tarantino's The Hateful Eight

• In Event: Tarantino’s Past, Balabanov’s Afterlife, Medinsky’s Future

Abstract

The Hateful Eight (2015), an American revisionist Western written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, tells the story of a bounty hunter, who is delivering a female fugitive to Red Rock, where she will be hanged and he will collect a $10,000 reward. Along the way, the pair get caught in a blizzard and are trapped with six other mysterious strangers in a roadside inn. In Lev Kuleshov’s By the Law (1926), a team of gold prospectors in the Yukon is involved in a murder. The two survivors, a husband and wife, subdue the killer but are then faced with an agonizing dilemma while cut off from civilization by the snow. They must decide whether to exact justice themselves or to wait and deliver him to authorities for justice. V. Shklovsky based his script on Jack London’s story “The Unexpected” (1907); the result, according to D. Bordwell, is “a concentration on the tense drama of three people trapped together in a tiny cabin.” As I will demonstrate in my paper, Tarantino has utilized Kuleshov’s “constructivist Western,” a highlight of '20s Soviet Cinema and one of the most popular films of its time. Not only does Tarantino follow the staging of the Russian minimalist masterpiece by turning a cabin into the perfect setting for a stripped-down chamber play, but also raises broader ethical issues of law and order, gender and crime, historical and metanarrative structures. During his visit to Moscow in 2004, Tarantino talked about his aesthetic debt to Eisenstein and Vertov as well, he revealed that Boris Pasternak has long been his literary idol. A mastermind of intricate cinematic puzzles, in his latest film Tarantino was able to produce an exquisite homage to Russian literature and Soviet cinema.

Author

• Yuri Leving, Dalhousie U (Canada)